Americans Love ‘Nazi Propaganda’ Film; Conservatives Celebrate

Conservative pundits are gloating this morning. The new film American Sniper attracted huge audiences this past weekend. Americans love it, even though liberal pundits condemned it.

Most famously, actor Seth Rogen tweeted smarmily that the movie reminded him of a fictional Nazi propaganda film from the movie Inglorious Basterds. Apparently, in that fake film a German sniper is lionized.

Nazi propaganda from Hollywood…

American audiences, on the other hand, turned out in droves to see American Sniper. As conservative pundit Rich Lowry crowed in the pages of National Review, the movie marks the “return of the American war hero.” For liberals like Rogen, Lowry wrote, the story of real-life sniper Chris Kyle “smacks of backwardness and jingoism.”

At the Weekly Standard, Michael Graham argues that Hollywood liberals can’t seem to get it through their thick skulls that Americans want to see movies that are not aggressively “anti-American.” Mark Hemingway agreed. “Everyone in Hollywood,” Hemingway noted,

skews heavily left. . . . all these people line up to write checks for Hillary Clinton. . . . That might change now that they’ve seen that this film’s gonna make $90 million in one weekend in January. Maybe we’ll start to see more honest attempts at portraying soldiers.

1 Comment

Hollywood culture tends to affects a liberal identity, but it’s multi-billion dollar industry with long, deep ties to the gaming industry and the military which are undeniably the major vehicle for selling war on many levels. It seems like we’ve had nothing but “war hero” movies since Private Ryan, so it’s strange to think anyone would decry a deficit of them.